It occurs to me that not enough of my personal news is being painted in big bright letters by way of LJ. Sorry folks!

I'm in Peoria, IL right now. There's an Old Time Piano Playing Contest out here that nyankoframe is competing in. I told him last year that I'd come out to support him, but it turned out that the Mississippi trip interfered. Thus, I promised him this year.

And, well, I keep my promises.

It's been a good trip as such. Lots of old rags and the halls of the hotel are filled with some hard piano playing. It's interesting being an observer to all this and I am quite fond of the music being played, even if I know only a small fraction of it.

The trip was notable for having flown into O'Hare in Chicago, landing at approximately 1 AM, and driving a rental car the remaining distance (over which I passed two other airports). We made it into the hotel at around 4 AM.

We had quite the time trying to find good music on the radio. It had an XM radio and it seemed like the majority of stations would play a single, good song followed by endless crap. I finally found one that I liked, while zetshia_gudani made her best attempts at sleeping through my off-key hooting.

We wandered outside the hotel our first morning for breakfast and found that the entire city seems to sleep in. We discovered quickly that in Peoria, the bars are bars, the restaurants are bars, and any building you pick randomly is likely to be a bar, so the whole sleeping in thing makes pretty good sense.

Found a steak place (Richard's on Main) which serves steaks until 4 AM. Pretty decent stuff too.

So anyway, I have nothing against Peoria as a town. It's done nothing but treat me right.

Anyway, more piano playing is forthcoming -- nyankoframe made it to the semi-finals. From the stuff I heard yesterday, I'm looking forward to it.

And tomorrow, I travel into Chicago. I'm going to make an attempt at getting an honest-to-god Chicago pizza.And then, I climb on board a plane, get home, and try to pretend that work isn't in about 8 hours.

(Also, why does the bay area think it's OK to close roadways and a BART line on memorial day weekend? WE'RE TRYING TO TRAVEL THAT DAY! You're paying fat, lazy people double wages for working on a holiday when none of us want them working that day!)

(Yes, that's rhetorical. I know why it happens. It's just annoying that my ride to SFO took about two and a half hours.)